 Welcome to St. LaVeau's World Cinema. I'm your hostess, Betty St. LaVeau. On this show, we talk about foreign movies. And today, because I've been reading about Joan of Auc the last two days, I decided that our movies are going to be set in France and set one set back in the medieval days and one set in the present day. So before we get into the movie, I wanted to say that I read Nancy Goldstone's Excellent, The Maid and the Queen, The Secret History of Joan of Auc. And it talks about how Yolanda of Aragon, who was the mother-in-law of Charles VII, the king that Joan fought for, played an extremely important role in the diplomatic process that set France on to its path that it had before his father, Charles VI, ruled. So French history sometimes can be a little bit convoluted. But the fact that the French revere their heroines and their heroes and their queens is something near and dear to my heart. So that's one of the reasons why our first movie today, oh, and by the way, The Maid and the Queen, please check out Nancy Goldstone's Excellent book. It gets better as it goes on. And the last quarter of the book, I was just laughing. The writer, it has an incredible wit. And what a great read. So please check it out if you want to know some of the history of the Hundred Years' War. Now, we're going to fast forward a little bit in time to France about 50 years later, where Catherine de Medici has married Henry II, the most enigmatic king. He unfortunately died of a jousting accident. This sets the French nobility and aristocracy on a path of much unhappiness. I think that if he had lived, things would have been easier for his progeny who survived him. As it is, we're going to explore the beautiful Queen Margot, which was directed by, I think, Pierre Cheneau. And it stars Isabel Angénie as Margaret Vela, Danielle Eltelier, Jean Hugh Englade, Barbette Schroeder, Vincent Perez, Verna Vissi, Dominique Blanc, Pascal Gregory, Miguel Bose, Ezia Argento, Jean Corbele, and Jules Rosam. Please forgive me. My French is seventh grade French. It's not very good. So the first time I saw this movie, I could not even believe what I was looking at. I think I've talked about this movie on another show before. It is actually a slice of history which involves Catherine de Medici and one of her sons plotting the Saint-Barthal-Moustée massacre, which murdered the Huguenot faction in France. And the Huguenots were Protestants at the time. The new religion was an up-and-coming one, and there are kings, dukes, and counts who support it, and kings, dukes, and counts who did not. So there's much unrest in the kingdom. And to bring the Catholic and the Protestant together, Catherine, Regent of France, decided to marry her daughter, Margot, to the king of Navarre, Henri Bourbon, who later became Henry IV. Now, this all might sound a little bit confusing, but basically there was a religious civil war. There were three different kings named Henri. One was a duke, one was Catherine's son, and one was Henri of Navarre, and they all fought for supremacy of France. Now, when we look at this movie, it's based on the novel by Alexandre de Mont. I have not read the book. It's a cordially romantic tale. Catherine is used as a pawn to bring the factions together, but she has a will of her own. I want to say here that in America, I find we don't really make movies as graphic as this. For instance, when Ron Howard and Brian Grazer tried to make the movie The Alamo, Touchstone Pictures, I think a subsidiary of Disney, I'm not sure though, didn't want them to produce it the way that they had the vision of the movie. They were like, look, it's the Alamo. There's blood, there's gore, there's brown people, it's horrible, it's a mess, people are dying everywhere. And Touchstone said, no, it's a PG movie. And Ron Howard and Brian Grazer said, this is not PG material. Neither is the St. Bartholomew's Dace Massacre. So when you see the pikes come out and people getting piked, and there's a defense formation, it's called, throwing someone out the window. It's a horribly, horribly graphic, but what great filmmaking. The music's awesome. I neglected to, pardon me, write down the name of the composer there. This movie won a few awards. It was Best Director for Patricia Rowe and Isabel Adjani won Best Actress. I believe Jean-Hu Englade won a Best Supporting Actor Cesar Award, and so did Verna Lisi, who played Catherine de' Medici. And there was also a Best Symmetography Award and a Costume Design Award. So Margot being a pawn and not in love with her husband, from the opening scenes, we know that something horde is going to happen. If we don't know our history, we do not know what it is. As the movie progresses, both Margot and her husband there, Henri of Navarre, circumnavigate the treacherous waters of medieval France. Please check it out, okay? You're going to love it. And all the guys are handsome. One critic wrote that the casting made the royalty back then look like a bunch of aging rock stars. Backers are all rather terribly sexy. If you look at the pictures of what these guys really look like back in the day, especially Charles the Ninth, they all look kind of runty looking, pardon. I mean, they did, you know, but bad genetics. Catherine's parents, I think, were cousins, and Catherine was distant cousins with her husband. So the royalty were all marrying each other. So that's why they didn't look, you know, too appetizing. But the guys who starred in the movie look fantastic, and so do the gals. Okay, so the next movie we're going to go to is Agnes as far as wrenching the vagabond, starring Sandra Bonaire. Now, we've all have thought, maybe not all of us, but we've all thought about wandering the road, traveling like a hobo. Preston, Sturgis is wonderful. That movie, Joe McCrea and Veronica Lake. Sullivan's Travels, okay, shows the pitfalls of that as well as Paul Muniz. I was a prisoner on a chain gang. Okay, so to be a vagabond, you know, you think freedom and the romance of it, but there is that movie, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnein, and Lee Marvin was said of the hobos, and Ernest Borgnein was said of the conductors, and the hobos and the conductors were always fighting. Being a hobo, it's not a dream life, okay? So when you're younger, some of us think, oh, to travel the road and be free, yada, yada, yada. A friend of mine, one of my best friends a couple years ago said, I'd love to be a vagabond. She is one of the most responsible people I know, and I said to her, we're going to sit down one day and watch Vagabond. Now, I read the review for this movie when it first came out. Saw it a couple years later. Child, I did not know where to look. Okay, like I did not know where to look. So let me look at my notes here. The movie illustrates the perils of the road. The beginning is showed, oh, pardon me, the end is shown at the beginning. I lost Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder's movie. I like that technique. The movie's told in flashbacks. And as we watch our vagabond, her name is Mona, you think, oh, happy, go lucky traveling down the road. She curses a truck driver. She's rude. She's rude to almost every single person that she meets. She kind of is a taker. The perils of the road have hardened her. She meets all types of people in the time frame that the movie is set. A nice bourgeois lady, and there's one other character. Oh, Tunisian migrant worker, both of whom are the only two people who seem to have good heart. Almost everyone else, all the characters seem a bit cynical to Mona comes across. All right. So Varda actually plays the interviewer slash narrator who is recounting Mona's life in those two days that we see her on the road, which is a very nice touch. Usually when someone's narrating a movie, they put a different voiceover. Anyone who's playing the movie usually isn't doing the voiceover. I don't think that was true of Citizen Kane. I sort of thought maybe Justin Cotton or Orson was narrating it. I can't remember. At any rate, it's a nice touch. Please watch this movie. You're 16-year-old. Don't threaten them with military school if they're act up. Show them this movie. Show them and illustrate to them that we all need one another. We're all in it together and we're all related. And if you choose to turn your back on family and society, not in a way that's productive for you and productive for everyone, but in a way that demeans you and hurts everyone else, that road is a long and hard one. So I love this movie. I love the darkness of it. It's actually very scary. But Mona is one of the most scariest characters of them all. She's a vagabond. And there's a reason why this young lady is traveling the road. Tearjerker said, but you're going to find that she's not all that sympathetic character. All right. So I think that that's it for me today. I'm your host, this Betty St. Leveau. You've been watching St. Leveau's World Cinema. This episode is a little on the short side. Next episode, I think we're going to explore the Nigerian film industry and a little bit of Hong Kong filmmaking. Until I see you again, our links, Chow Baila. And check out some movies with some subtitles. They won't hurt you. Chow.